Stavros Petrou

Stavros Petrou is Academic Research Lead in Health Economics and Professor of Health Economics in the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences.  Having previously held posts as Health Economist at the University of Oxford (1997-2010) and Professor of Health Economics at the University of Warwick (2010-2019), he returned to Oxford in July 2019. 

A highly regarded academic, he is one of only two health economists to have held an MRC Senior Non-Clinical Research Fellowship.  He has been an NIHR Senior Investigator since 2017 (term 2 commencing in 2021). He has served as a core member of the Department of Health’s Policy Research Programme Commissioning Panel, a member of NIHR Programme Grants for Applied Research funding panels, and currently serves on a number of external committees and editorial boards. He serves as a mentor to mid-career academic researchers through the Academy of Medical Sciences.

During his career he has published over 250 articles in peer-reviewed journals, and has recently co-authored several studies published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the Lancet, BMJ and JAMA.  He has authored a number of research studies within the field of health economic evaluation that have directly impacted health care policies at a national level.

Methodological development within health economic evaluation represents one of the key themes of his research.  In recent years he has led several methodological studies, the primary outputs of which have been published by Health Economics, European Journal of Health Economics, PharmacoEconomics, Medical Decision Making and Quality of Life Research.

He has recently acted as member of a number of working groups developing methodological approaches and reporting standards for health economic evaluation, including the Department of Health Review of Cost-Effectiveness Methodology for Immunisation Programmes and Procurements working group, and the ISPOR Health Economic Publication Guidelines Task Force.

Stavros has overseen the design, conduct, analysis and reporting of alternative types of complex health economic research projects, including trial-based economic evaluations, economic evaluations based on decision-analytic models, systematic reviews, preference elicitation studies, and analyses of both cross-sectional data and cohort study data using econometric techniques.

His current research projects include:

MEMVIE – a programme of mathematical and economic modelling for immunisation programmes in England, funded by the Department of Health Policy Research Programme.

RECAP – a programme of work on the long-term effects of preterm birth through childhood and adulthood, funded by the European Commission Horizon 2020 Programme.

VALENTIA – a study that aims to enhance knowledge about methods for valuing benefits and harms within economic assessments of antenatal and newborn screening, funded by the NIHR Health Technology Assessment Programme.

Stavros is a senior research fellow at Green Templeton College, and is happy to hear from prospective DPhil students, especially those interested in developing economic-focussed research based on routine primary care systems, such as CPRD, QResearch and the RCGP Research and Surveillance Centre data.